1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for administering a lock for resources in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today may be employed in distributed computing environments, such as massively parallel computers, in which many computer systems are coupled for data communications and utilized together for additional computational bandwidth. In such a distributed computing environment, tasks of the computer system may share resources, such as memory, input/output (I/O), and the like. Controlling the availability and use of the shared resources among many tasks is often carried out through use of a lock. Locks, today, however, are administered in such a way that can result in a task chasing the lock forever without ever (or at least for an appreciable amount of time) being able to obtain the lock. That is, locks in today's distributed computing environment are often implemented in an unfair manner between tasks in the environment.